Adopting standard business reporting

Standard Business Reporting (SBR) is an Australian Government initiative that simplifies business-to-government reporting.

SBR created a single Australian reporting taxonomy, which is the language entities most commonly use to send reports to government agencies.

The Australian Tax Office, Australian Securities & Investments Commission and state and territory revenue offices began using SBR for reporting in 2010. APRA incorporated SBR from 1 July 2011.

What is a taxonomy?

A taxonomy is a language system used to clearly and accurately classify objects and concepts by name. Taxonomies have been developed in business and finance to ensure consistency in how governments, regulators, businesses and other stakeholders use, and understand the meaning of, key words and phrases. The most important taxonomy for Australian businesses is the Australian Reporting Dictionary, which is part of the Standard Business Reporting initiative.

The SBR taxonomy is based on international best practice. In developing the taxonomy, identical concepts with different names were harmonised under one tag, while allowing industry-specific labels for the same term in different reports. Similarly, items with the same name, but multiple definitions, were identified and uniquely tagged.

Definitional Taxonomy refers to the dictionary of all terms and their agreed meanings.

Reporting Taxonomy refers to the combination of terms, concepts and dimensions needed to report specific information to government agencies, such as APRA.

The SBR taxonomy is written using a global computer language for business and finance reporting called XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). An XBRL instance document is a reporting form that has been successfully completed.

The capability of XBRL to communicate precise meanings, independent of any software application or platform, makes it useful for the transmission of business and financial information to multiple company stakeholders and regulators.

For more information about XBRL, see D2A and XBRL or www.xbrl.org.

What are the benefits of adopting standard business reporting?

Adopting SBR can save businesses time and money, and reduce the risk of reporting errors by delivering:

• tighter, more streamlined and cleaner regulatory and operations control frameworks;
• a reduction in manual interventions;
• improved reconciliation and movement analysis;
• traceability, audit ability, transparency and consistency;
• an alignment of management information strategy, business reporting and regulatory reporting to use the same source data;
• streamlined reporting processes, less data manipulation, less time needed to produce reports; and
• fewer re-submissions to APRA.This is in addition to creating greater confidence in the regulatory reporting process.

How do I reduce my regulatory burden by streamlining my reporting?

Use XBRL 2.1 and the SBR taxonomy to tag your data, generate XBRL files and import the returns into D2A for APRA reporting. Re-use tagged data for other government reporting.

APRA reporting entities can:

1. Download from http://www.sbr.gov.au the full SBR Definitional and Reporting taxonomies that include all data on APRA reporting collected via D2A or use the SBR tab in D2A to download the reporting taxonomies.
2. Use the taxonomies to tag source data.
3. Upgrade D2A version to accept XBRL 2.1 imports.
   
   Previously submitted data can be displayed on the screen and exported as an XBRL2.1 example report.
   
   D2A also has test mode feature. Refer to the D2A page for more information.

How do I adopt standard business reporting?

APRA is currently putting together a package of support material to assist reporting entities adopt SBR. The package includes:

• PET that describes the data collected by APRA in terms of the SBR taxonomy;
• report header and custom validations; and
• Refer to the D2A and XBRL page for some frequently requested details specific to XBRL and D2A.Should you require further information, please email sbr@apra.gov.au APRA XBRL2.0 Taxonomy has been superseded with SBR Taxonomy from July 2011XBRL 2.0 taxonomy, which APRA introduced in 2002, has been replaced in July 2011 with the SBR Taxonomy XBRL 2.1. D2A currently supports both taxonomies.